First paragraph:
Parties often have to campaign for two or more levels of
office at the same time. For instance, American Presidential
elections are combined with contests for both Houses of
Congress, while British general elections have regularly
been combined with elections for local government. While
much is known about how the efforts of party organizations
on the ground impact upon electoral outcomes (Denver et al.,
2004; Pattie and Johnston, 2003; Whiteley and Seyd, 2003),
very little is known about how local organizations deal with
campaigning for different levels of office at the same time,
not least when new and different electoral systems are used.
This is important because the concurrent use of different
electoral systems can give very different incentives to
party organizations in their attempts to communicate with
voters.

Figures and
Tables:

Figure 1. Mean number of election workers by
party.

Table 1. Index of constituency party campaign effort,
2007

Figure 2. Index of campaign effort and constituency
marginality 2007.

Table 2. Mean proportion of campaign time spent on
campaigning for regional list candidates by region and
party

Last Paragraph:
(first pararaph of conclusions) What do these findings
suggest about parties? Four points can be tentatively
forwarded. First, while there is some evidence of vote
maximization activity by party organizations under the
different electoral systems, particularly under SMP, this is
ultimately mediated by previous success and party
organization. With STV, some local organizations made
considerable efforts to adapt to the new system, primarily
in areas of previous electoral success and strong
organization. Others appear to have made limited efforts,
often only standing one candidate, due to limited
organization, insufficient data on voters or lack of
previous success in the area, even where they might have
benefited from having another candidate to mop up transfers.
Considerable efforts did not extend to the regional list
Table 5. Did introduction of STV complicate party campaigns?
element of MMP; local party efforts at this level appeared
largely tokenistic. This confirms the finding that local
activity is lower under PR rules (Karp et al., 2008) but
extends it to an MMP setting. This highlights a second
point: that party organizations have apparently not, even
after three elections using MMP, wholly learned how to
attempt to maximize their advantage under both elements of
the MMP system. When combined with the STV evidence, this
suggests that local organizations are unlikely to
immediately be strategic vote maximizing actors under new
electoral systems. Instead, they go through a lengthy period
of learning how to adapt to new electoral
systems.